Critical Role: The Unconstant Dead
by Eponymous Rose
Summary: During his first night back in the realm of the living, Percy is visited by three ghosts. It's a great deal more comforting than it sounds. [Spoilers for episode 69.]


Sleep comes easily. Rest does not.

He dreams, fitfully, of trying to clutch a tattered cloak around himself, of smooth silk slipping between numb fingers, of a cold that claws and tears at every breath. His mouth is dry, parched, and he watches a long strip of desert wheel away beneath him, a tantalizing glimpse of mountains, and then the endless unbordered ocean breaks over his head, cold as a river in winter. After a time, he stops reaching for the shore, stops grasping at the jagged shards of glass that spin past, and drifts, watching his blood cloud the water like a shadow.

A hand on his shoulder, warm, insistent. For a moment, he expects Keyleth, bloodied and ragged and fading with him in and out of consciousness in that screaming hell of gunfire and glass and shattered bone.

But when he finally manages to force his eyes open, it's to a dark, cool, silent room. He inhales, slowly, and the chill air streaming through an open window does a great deal to dispel the stench of stale blood and sweat and black powder that clings to his clothes. With an effort, he turns his head to one side.

Cassandra is sitting on the floor beside the bed, chin resting on her hand, her face so close to his that he can feel her warm breath moving his hair. She watches him, and he sees something in her jawline, something in the shock of white in her hair, that reminds him of Anna. He finds he doesn't feel any particular way about that at the moment.

"You're going to fall off the bed, brother," she says, eventually. "Your legs are hanging off the edge and your head's where your feet should be. Were you actually asleep before you stepped in the room?"

"So annoying," he mumbles into the blankets.

She sniffs a laugh and reaches out to card her fingers through his hair, and all he can think is that the dry blood's going to flake and it'll be that much harder to wash away in the morning. "I wanted to check in on you. I couldn't tell from the door if you were still breathing."

"Am I?" He swallows, smacks his dry lips, presses his face back into the bed. "That's nice."

"I take it you're going to be useless for a bit." Her hand stills against his forehead. "And I know for a fact that you're going to make even poorer decisions than usual for a while. I certainly did."

"You lived," he says, and thinks of arrows, the sound of running feet faltering behind him, the creeping dark of the forest, the rushing river. Terror, panic, guilt... and still, frustratingly, a slow warmth building in his chest that insists on filling all the hollowed-out places.

Cassandra presses a kiss to his forehead, a benediction, a warning. "I died," she says. "In every way imaginable, I died that day. And now I live. The whole situation is very poetic and terrible, which means you'll probably love it."

"I hate you so much."

She flicks his earlobe with her forefinger; he's too tired to flinch away, but he does manage a passable excuse for a grumbled curse. "Do me a favor and keep breathing, brother. Everything's made so much more complicated when you do, and I know you wouldn't have it any other way."

He sighs, then sighs again, deeper, and lets himself sink.

* * *

"—this was probably a bad idea. I should just leave."

He inhales, coughs, wedges an arm under himself, and rolls onto his side, blinking blearily. "It's all right," he says, even before the words have fully registered, because he knows that voice and they all tell her the same thing, again and again. "Stay."

Pike is standing in the doorway to his room, and the dim moonlight filtering through the window is enough to make out the flush high on her cheeks that he knows she only gets when she's had a few drinks. But her wide stance is steady, and her jaw is clenched in some sort of determination. She's had time to sober up, a bit. How long has he been sleeping? How long has she been speaking to him, in the dark?

"I didn't mean to wake you," she says, and pushes a loose lock of hair out of her eyes with the palm of her hand. "I'm not very good at keeping quiet, I guess. I wanted to make sure you were all right before I went to bed."

He swallows, coughs again. "I think I may throw up."

She takes a step forward, hesitates, rocks back on her heels. "I should have been there," she says, finally, and the shock of the anger in her voice jolts him out of his fog. "I should have been there when you needed me."

"You were," he says, fumbling to shove himself to a sitting position against the softness of the mattress. "Pike, your necklace was just enough. And if you'd been there, Anna might have..." He thinks, again, about the blood at the corner of Keyleth's mouth. The ringing, concussive blast of the explosion, the bodies on the ground around him. The held-breath silence before they moved again. "It could have gone much worse."

Pike hugs herself, backing up another step. "I didn't know what to say. For the ritual. I'm not, I mean, I speak with Sarenrae and sometimes she listens, but I don't understand the connection, not really. I'm still learning, and you could've paid the price. But I wanted so badly to help." She shakes her head, smiles crookedly. "I wanted to... I guess I wanted to tell you that I'll try my best to be here so you have someone to talk to about this."

He's propped up on one elbow, but he can feel the arm shaking and quivering with the strain. "We're getting alarmingly well-versed in dealing with death."

"It's different," Pike says, "when somebody has time to mourn you. They'll all see you differently, now, and the wrongness of it will fester. Try not to spend too much time chasing after those hours you missed."

He coughs a laugh. "I sincerely doubt they'll look at me any differently once the initial shock's worn off."

Pike sighs, scratching absently at the scar over her eye. "You did when it was me."

"I'm not you, Pike. I couldn't pretend to be."

She shakes her head. "And that's exactly what I mean. It'll be complicated, for a while."

Sinking back onto the bed, pressing his face against the blankets, he says, softly, "That's what everybody keeps telling me: it'll be complicated."

"I'll see you in the morning," she says, like it's a revelation, and he thinks he's beginning to understand what she's getting at.

He breathes slow. Breathes slower.

* * *

He dreams, for no particular reason, of the sunken tomb, of cold skin and colder eyes deep beneath the water.

Shards of residuum between his shaking fingers ( _her_ shaking fingers), pressed gently to an unmoving chest ( _his_ unmoving chest). Inadequate, he thinks. (Just enough.) The processed artificiality of a home he's not sure he could ever claim. ( _Home_.)

No time to mourn.

There are hands, gentle, deft, at his sides, shifting something about his jacket. He inhales once, twice, but can't gain purchase on consciousness. Drifts instead, peacefully.

A soft voice whispers, "I'm glad you're back," and he thinks, for a time, that nothing in the world could be less complicated than that.

He dreams of all the water draining from all the seas, dreams of glass crumbling away to sand, dreams of warmth and light in all the empty places. Pulls the tattered cloak around himself and sinks finally into its ragged comfort.

Breathes.


End file.
